Technological Fantasies

This site is about future technology. I am less concerned with how practical the ideas are than I am with the ideas themselves. I call these Technological Fantasies.

I used to have a very different web site of this name, expensively hosted with its own domain name. Should have kept it alive regardless of cost, but didn't. Anyway, I have have many technological fantasies and hope you have more. Here are some which evolved during the writing of a giant novel, called, of course, Technological Fantasies.

1. A system for actually finding compatible people for various reasons, one which would actually work, unlike such things as dating services.

See the FindCompatibles web page and blog listed here for information.

2. Practical immortality in a virtual world, but an actual transfer of personality to that medium, not just creation of a copy. See the Practical Immortality website and blog listed here for more information.

3. Small computers which are entirely wireless, getting power from sunlight, communicating by digital radio. One example from the book is a computer the size of a grain of sand. In that chapter one of the characters displays a whole handfull of such sand, which can not only communicate by digital radio but display text across the combined surfaces of the grains, which have microscopic LEDs on all surfaces. Indeed, using piezoelectric effects, this handfull of sand can receive and process spoken sound, then reply, again with piezoelectric vibrations.

4. A device to be worn, which has enough computer power and powerful enough digital radio links to other computers so it can draw on an enormous computing network. As well as the simple task of acting as a portable phone, this device would support a variety of simple but powerful commands. In the book I mention many, but in particular SysTalk which does not take contact information for any person as a parameter, but simply scans the globe for the best possible match, the person who is the best for you to talk to at that moment, (and the most likely to be free to take your call). Another command is SysTeach, which also takes no parameters but just begins or continues a lesson that is the most appropriate for you at that moment.

Oh, many many more things, my technological fantasies. I would like to hear yours.
The complete novel,
Technological Fantasies
is now available, to be read online or downloaded.
The links to these individual volumes may be broken, as they were put on a free site. Please go to my
books
page if so.

Please see these web pages:

Social Tech
a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.

Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following
blogs
:

Social Technology
the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.

Find Compatibles
devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.

Technological Fantasies
devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.

Sex-Politics-Religion
is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.

I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.

Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceeed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an upopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.

By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of
Find Compatibles
, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.

As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transporation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.

In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.

I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.

This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maiintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at
an earlier version of this page
, rather longer, and at an
overview
of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.

I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.